Industries use drills in components for assembling products. Such drills can be of variable size and be performed on a wide variety of materials. The aircraft industry is a prime example of an industry that uses drills of various sizes in a variety of components formed of various metals, such as aluminum, titanium, and synthetic materials, such as composite.
In order to ensure a secure product assembling, drills are inspected to verify that fulfil with the drill current regulations established by the airworthiness directives. The regulations define the geometry characteristics that drills must comply.
Traditionally, drills have been sized by inserting them by hand into bushings that gauge the drill diameter. Like most manual processes, the process lacks of reliability since the gauging depends both on the operator's interpretation and the bushing condition. In addition, manual sizing becomes most difficult when a large number of drills separated by small gaps have to be sized, or when drills are in a product with difficult access.
Further, manual sizing is a slow and expensive task, particularly, when it is necessary to size a large number of drills of variable size, which have been performed over variable materials. The drill behavior varies depending on the material. Thus, in the aircraft industry, the drill sizing has to be particularly performed over aluminum, titanium, and composite, which form the most common materials used in the sector. Moreover, composite involves an added difficult since it should be treated as a family of materials due to the great variety of materials that can be obtained by varying the fiber material, the layout, the stacking, the resin material, or the curing time.
Nowadays, most of these limitations have been reduced by the use of optical technology. This technology has significantly improved the drill measuring accuracy.
One example of this optical technology is the patent application U.S. 2014/0368834 A1. The application describes an optical thread profiler capable of measuring at least one physical characteristic of an internally threaded surface of an object. The apparatus performs laser triangulation measurements. However, the described apparatus requires making physical contact with the object to be measured, which complicates and slows down the measuring task. Also, the apparatus requires performing numerous movements and measures to get one physical characteristic of the drill.
Therefore, it has been detected in the aeronautical industry the need of a new device which be able to reduce the time required for obtaining drill measures, and that achieves simplifying the drill measuring task.